Shopping cart abandonments plague eCommerce shop owners large and small. The average cart abandonment rate across the industry is about 72%, according to this study.

So is there anything you can do about it or are you just supposed to accept that a high percentage of people will not follow through with the checkout process?

I don't think so. Here are my top 4 ways lowering your cart abandonment rate and increasing sales conversions:

1. Make sure your checkout is simple and each step of the checkout has a clear call to action for proceeding to the next step of the checkout process. If you don't have guest checkout enabled, that's a good first step.
2. Make it easier for them to pay. Everyone hates getting their credit card out. If you can integrate with Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal, it'll help to reduce friction at the most crucial point in the checkout; the payment step.
3. Collecting the email address should be early in your checkout process so that if they abandon the checkout at the payment step you can automatically send them follow-up emails to help sell them on that product they were interested in. You can do this with a limited-time offer, include emails that feature customer testimonials, or maybe address any concerns or frequently asked questions they might have before buying.
4. You can repurpose that email sequence content from step 3 and turn it into a remarketing PPC campaign on Google or Facebook. The goal of this campaign is to target people who started the checkout but didn't complete the purchase (i.e. cart abandonment).